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valley with the shepherd all the rest of the afternoon, staying pretty much on the other side of the valley from him, but watching his sheep, and sending back the few that strayed in my direction. He seemed not to notice me and said nothing, so that I wondered if by ill-fortune I had stumbled on a Humper who couldn't talk, but when the sun came close to the horizon he stood and began herding the sheep along a fairly easy route home. I did not follow, but when the shepherd crested a rise, after making it plain he didn't need my help on this journey, he turned and watched me for a moment, then beckoned. I was to come home with him.

I followed him for several kilometers before we came to a cluster of three low, thatched houses. They looked like small hills, the roofs the color of the summer-yellowed grass, but inside they were warm against the cold night. The sea wind came heavily from the north, even during the summer nights, and the deep current that flowed through the Humping Sea was icy-- though Britton was as far south as Wong, which sweltered in the summer, no night in Humping was ever warm, and the winters, while usually snowless, killed any fool who was caught out of doors after sunset. Except, of course, someone like me, who could sink into the earth if I desired; or just as easily draw heat from the air around me, no matter how cold it was. They could not have known this about me, however; to them I was a man alone, inviting death each night I spent in the open.

That may have been part of the reason the shepherd invited me home. It was well-known to the Humpings (for news of any kind travels quickly in lonely places like this) that no one had taken me in; I spent night after night in the hills, yet was still alive. That made me somehow holy and powerful, and they were in awe of me; yet when I proved my intentions were kind by helping the shepherd with his sheep, I was accepted, not as one of them, but as one they would willingly share their small homes and tiny larders with.

Dinner was a stew, and since the wife had not known I was coming, the pot was meager. Since I needed no food at all, I took the smallest portion I dared-- large enough to accept hospitality, but no more. And when the pot had been passed around and scraped clean by the shepherd's wife on her own dish, the shepherd looked at me.

For what? Did these people pray? Or was there some custom a man had to follow when offered food? I didn't know, so I smiled and said, "My name is Lake-drinker, and what good I can do you, I will always do you."

The shepherd nodded gravely, and turned to his wife. She laid her hands on the table, closed her eyes, and intoned:

Sun on wheat, Baking bread, Making meat From the dead. Good we give That we live.

Then, reverently, the three children, none older than five, watched as their mother took a spoonful of stew from her own plate and gave it to her husband, who solemnly chewed the bit of meat and swallowed. Then the husband took stew from his own dish and gave it to me, and I also ate. I was unsure what to do next, but the ritual made a kind of sense, and so I took from my dish and gave to each of the children, who looked wide-eyed and surprised, but ate.

The shepherd looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said, "You are welcome here forever."

Then we fell to and the stew was gone in a few minutes.

They made a place for me in the largest bed, a frame filled with straw and covered with blankets. I knew it was the parents' bed, and indeed they were preparing to sleep on the floor of packed dirt. I had slept on the earth during many a field maneuver in Mueller, long before the earth taught me another kind of welcome in Schwartz; I had no need of comfort when I slept. So I ignored the offered bed and curled up on the floor by the door. A cold draught slipped under the door, but my Schwartz-trained body coped easily, and the parents, wonderingly, went to bed in the straw.

In the morning,